Just One Year

I can’t lift my arms over my head, so Celine helps me off with the hospital scrubs. She stares at my chest a long time. She shakes her head.

“What?”

She clucks her tongue. “She should not have left you like this.”

I start to explain that she didn’t leave me like this, not knowingly. Celine dismisses me with a wave of her hands. “No matter. You are here now. Go into the bathroom and clean yourself up. I will cook something.”

“You?”

“Do not laugh. I can make eggs. Or soup.”

“Don’t trouble yourself. I have no appetite.”

“Then I will make you a bath.”

She draws me a bath. I hear it running and think of rain, which has stopped. I feel the drugs starting to work, the soft tentacles of sleep slowly tugging me under. Celine’s bed is like a throne and I collapse onto it, thinking of my airplane dream earlier today and how it felt slightly different from the usual nightmare. Right before I fall asleep, one of my lines—Sebastian’s lines—from Twelfth Night pops into my head: “If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!”

• • •

At first, I think I’m dreaming again. Not the airplane dream, a different one, a good one. A hand trailing up and down my back, slipping lower, lower. She kept her hand on my heart. All morning as we slept on that hard floor. This hand tickles toward my waist and then goes lower. Bruised, not broken, the doctor said. In my sleep, I feel my strength returning.

My own hand finds her warm body, so soft, so inviting. I slip my hand between her legs. She groans.

“Je savais que tu reviendrais.”

And then it’s the nightmare all over again. Wrong place. Wrong person. Wrong plane. I jolt up in bed, push her away so hard she tumbles to the floor.

“What are you doing?” I shout at Celine.

She stands up, unapologetically naked in glow of the streetlight. “You are in my bed,” she points out.

“You’re supposed to be taking care of me,” I say. This sounds all the more pathetic because we both know I don’t want her to.

“I thought I was,” she says, attempting a smile. She sits down on the edge of the bed, pats the sheet next to her. “You don’t have to do anything but lie back and relax.”

I am wearing nothing but my boxers. When did I take off my jeans? I see them folded neatly on the floor, along with the shirt from the hospital. I reach for the shirt. My muscles protest. I stand up. They howl.

“What are you doing?” Celine asks.

“Leaving,” I say, panting with the exertion. I’m not entirely sure I can get out of here, but I know I cannot stay.

“Now? It is late.” She looks incredulous. Until I step in my jeans. It is a painstakingly slow process, and it gives her time to digest the fact that I am, in fact, going. I can see what will happen: the reprise of the last time I was here. A stream of cursing, in French. I am a prick. I have humiliated her.

“I offered you my bed, me, and you push me out. Literally.” She is laughing, not because it’s funny but because it’s inconceivable.

“I’m sorry about that.”

“But you came to me. Yesterday. Again today. You always come back to me.”

“It was only for a place to leave the suitcase,” I explain. “It was for Lulu.”

The look on her face is different from what it was last time, when she threw the vase at me, after I told her it was time for me to go. That was fury. This is fury before it’s had time to set, raw and bloody. How foolish it was to visit Celine. We could’ve found another place for that suitcase.

“Her?” Celine yells. “Her? She was just some girl. Nothing special! And look at you now! She left you like this. I am always the one you come running to, Willem. That means something.”

I hadn’t taken Celine for one of the ones who wait. “I shouldn’t have come here. I won’t do it again,” I promise. I gather the rest of my things and hobble out of her flat, down the stairs to the street.

A police car flies by, its lights flashing through the finally dark streets, its siren whining: nyeah-nyeah, nyeah-nyeah.

Paris.

Not home.

I need to get home.

Five

SEPTEMBER

Amsterdam

Marjolein’s office is in a narrow canal house off of the Brouwersgracht, the inside of it all white and modern. Bram designed it, calling it one of his “vanity projects.” But there was nothing vain about Bram; that was just his code for not getting paid.

Bram’s day job was designing temporary crisis shelters for refugees, something he believed in but that didn’t challenge his creative side. So he was always on the lookout for ways to exercise his modern sensibilities— like transforming a tired transport barge into a three-story glass, wood, and steel floating palace that was once described as “Bauhaus on the Gracht” in a design journal.

Sara, Marjolein’s assistant, sits behind a clear Lucite table, a vase of white roses on the desk. When I come in, she gives me a nervous smile and slowly rises to take my coat. I lean in to kiss her hello. “Sorry I’m late,” I apologize.

“You’re three weeks late, Willem,” she says, as she ushers me in, accepting a kiss but not eye contact.

I give my best rogue’s grin, even though it pulls at the now-itchy wound on my cheek. “But worth waiting for?”

She doesn’t answer. It was more than two years ago that Sara and I had our moment. I was spending a lot of time in this office then, and she was there, our family attorney’s assistant. When it had first happened, I’d been besotted, Sara the older woman with the doleful eyes and the blue-painted bed. But it didn’t last. It never does.

“Technically, I was only a few days late,” I tell her now. “Marjolein’s the one who delayed us by two weeks.”

“Because she went on holiday,” Sara says, strangely huffy. “Which she had purposely booked for after the closing.”

“Willem.” Marjolein towers in the doorway, naturally tall, and taller yet in the stiletto heels she always wears. She beckons me into her office where Bram’s modern sensibility is everywhere. The messy papers and folders in precarious piles are Marjolein’s contributions.

“So you threw me over for a girl,” Marjolein says, shutting the door behind her.

I wonder how it is that Marjolein can possibly know this. She stares at me, clearly amused by something. “I called back, you know?”

On the train from London to Paris, I’d tried to text Marjolein about my delay, but my phone wouldn’t get a signal and was about to die anyway, and for some reason, I didn’t want to tell Lulu about any of it. So when I’d seen one of the Belgian backpacker girls in the cafe, I’d borrowed her phone. I’d had to fumble in my backpack for Marjolein’s number in my address book and had wound up spilling coffee all over me and the Belgian girl.

“She sounded pretty,” Marjolein says, with a grin that is both mischievous and scolding at the same time.